Writing Style Guides for Better UIs

A user interface gets noticeably better when you hand your coding agent a writing style guide and tell it to apply the whole thing to every string. Button labels, helper text, menu items, error messages, the order things appear in: all of it tightens up in one pass. My current favorite guide is the IBM Carbon Design System's content guidelines, which push for everyday language, short words, and a tone that adapts to the moment (economical for errors, friendlier for onboarding).

Why this is a good job for an agent

A lot of this used to be slow, committee-shaped work. Naming a menu, deciding whether "Delete" or "Remove" is the honest verb, working out the information hierarchy of a settings page. Hours of deliberation, sometimes days. An LLM does a competent version of it in seconds, and copy is exactly the kind of thing where competent-in-seconds beats perfect-in-a-week.

How to wire it up

Point the agent at the guide and say "apply this writing style guide to all user-facing text." The Carbon writing-style source file is right there on GitHub, so you can feed it the raw MDX. Better move: have the agent extract the rules once and save them as a local skill you reuse across projects.

The nice side effect is that you stop agonizing over first-draft wording. Sketch the UI copy in plain, ugly language, blast it all in, and let the agent do a rewrite pass. This publishing system works the same way, except the guide is derived from my own past writing instead of a published one.

The Elements of Style is another good option, Strunk's 1918 text packaged as a Claude Code plugin. I haven't used it yet, but people keep telling me it's worth installing.